World War II was a wonderful mix of high tech, low tech, and just plain crazy. One idea, which in many ways exemplified the era, was the concept of the pigeon-guided missile, thought up by none other than B.F. Skinner.

You may be looking at cute animal pictures on Flickr and YouTube for fun, but biologists are increasingly using those images for research into animal behavior. Case in point: Biologists used tourist pictures to track one humpback whale's epic migration.

From a neurological perspective, spiritual sensations like out-of-body experiences are fairly easy to understand. They're the result of changes in the brain's arousal system. But animals have the same system as humans...meaning animals could have a spirituality all their own.

Heavy users of Twitter or Facebook who constantly update their status have a counterpart in the animal kingdom...vultures. These birds can quickly change their skin color to let friends and enemies know how they're doing.

Alcohol consumption might seem like a particularly human trait, but animals can get drunk too... as long as researchers supply the booze. It turns out bees are the perfect little drunkards, which provides a great way to study alcohol abuse.

Echolocation in bats is generally seen as a sort of natural sonar, in which the bats use ultrasonic clicks to navigate the night sky and find prey. But it may also be a rudimentary language, transmitting greetings and social information.

In Close Encounters of the Third Kind, music bridged the gap between worlds, but music may not actually be the key to interspecies communication. Researchers have found that tamarin monkeys don't respond to human music, only music created for monkeys.